Oh The Humanities: Teens fight for their right to sext

Academics gathered this week in Montreal for the annual Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, presenting papers on everything from deconstructing salad to the publishing habits of academics. In our “Oh The Humanities” series the Post highlights some of the most interesting research.

Are the explicit text messages of teenagers evidence of child abuse or should they be regarded as freedom of expression?

That is the complicated ethical and legal dilemma considered by Amy Adele Hasinoff, in her paper, “No right to sext?” which considers a seminal case on the subject, where Pennsylvania district attorney George Skumanick was challenged over his threats of child pornography charges for high school students found with sexually explicit photos of their classmates.

In Pennsylvania, 16-year-olds can legally have sex with each other, but creating a digital image for their own use is technically child pornography.

Ms. Hasinoff, a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois, argues that 2009 case — in which the district attorney insisted the students attend an education program or face child pornography charges — ignores the adolescents’ freedom of expression.

“Rather than criminalizing adolescent sexual self-expression, we need new legal and educational policies that acknowledge and celebrate safe, consensual teenage sex acts, and demand that teens should have the right to sext,” she says in her paper.

Ms. Hasinoff takes issue with many of the perceptions used to rationalize, victimize or sympathize in cases of consensual adolescent sexting, among them, that adolescents are foolish, impulsive and immature and therefore unaware of the potential criminality of their acts.

Ms. Hasinoff suggests that society, and the law, should look at sexting as “potential evidence of girls’ sexual agency” instead of viewing “normal” girls who sext as “victims of biology, technology, and their adolescent immaturity and recklessness.”

She goes even further, and suggests viewing “sexting as an opportunity to redefine our skewed perceptions of teen girls’ sexuality and to reconsider our inconsistent child pornography laws.”